Erik Wilde on Services and APIs

Friday, October 31, 2008

Managing Feeds Using Feeds

the atom landscape is moving again: draft-divilly-atompub-hierarchy has just been published as a first draft spelling out how to use feeds for managing feeds. the model is based on the idea that posting an entry to a master collection implicitly causes a feed (called detail feed) to be created.

this proposal has a lot of similarities to our work on what we called feed feeds, with their main purpose being the use of feeds for the management of feed metadata. the proposed draft adds to that basic idea some functional dependencies, so that you not only manage feed metadata using feeds, you manage the actual feeds. while our feed feed model was based on the assumption that you want to manage feed metadata about feeds that you don't necessarily own or control, the proposed draft looks at a scenario where both the master entries and the detail feeds are managed together.

this draft adds one more interesting piece to the continually evolving Atom Landscape, which also had to be updated because quite a number of the listed drafts expired since the last update.